Lori Faust did not check her electronic calendar. A certain Fin did not know that. It was labeled Ms. Faust's Schedule and it was stored on the computer nearest her desk. Anyone would have made the same assumption that Panu did. Therefore it was unfair to say that everything that followed was his fault.

The Finnish technopath had given Faust a one week notice of his intents. He tried to warn her.  But it was not really Ms. Faust's schedule at all, it was the one her secretary maintained for her. And the woman barely even glanced at the notification before she deleted it.

And so, from where Ms. Faust sat in her modern building, with its many fancy laboratories and its weird basement that had stairs going down but no cameras after that, it began with the interns.

Fifteen bright-eyed college students, from liberal arts majors to premed. They showed up at Faust Pharmaceuticals at 8AM sharp, as per their orientation letters (though one, an intern for the IT department, was running twenty minutes late). They found comfortable seats in the lobby and chatted excitedly among their ranks as the receptionists smiled very wide smiles and desperately phoned HR. No one had told the receptionists that there would be a Fall cohort of interns, much less that they would arrive today.

No one had told HR, either. Or any of the departments the interns were allocated to. At 9AM, with the interns getting restless like puppies left in a crate too long, HR dug up the Summer orientation slides and carted all fifteen off to a conference room to get them settled. Around the company, the phone calls continued.

In the end, only two departments were found who had known the interns were coming. The print room, who had gotten their paperwork together on the fanciest of letterhead, as per usual, and the mail room, who had sent the letters smoothly out the door.

No one had checked with the YMCA tucked in the neighboring building. It was not part of Faust Pharmaceuticals, but it catered to their working parents, and to the surrounding buildings. The last of its summer youth programs, an art camp, had started one week ago. Enrolled was one Panu Joutsen. His teachers found him very shy and quiet, but very focused for his age. He did not talk much with the other students, but he could work for hours on his own, diligently rolling coils for a pot or mixing colors for a painting. His art was not very good (this was not something you said to a child), but he was always willing to help clean up the paint brushes at the end of the day, so he was well liked by the staff, even though he had a very distant look sometimes and did not always respond until the second or third time he was spoken to.

Panu's real art was not where the teachers could see.

It had been very very easy to find the intern letters from the Summer, and the list of almost-but-not-quite accepted interns. HR was very good at labeling their folders but very bad at securing their data. All he had to do was copy and paste the names into the letters, and put a new date on them, and all was good to print.

On each of the intern's itineraries was listed, very prominently, Lunch and Welcome Lecture from CEO Lori Faust.

This was day one. Monday, 8/24/2015.

This is the message Ms. Faust's secretary had deleted, one week prior:

Have a Bad Day, reoccurring, 8/24/2015-[event does not end]
Note: Bad Day will stop when you leave the city. This is only warning.

"Just grab an old one and ctrl F." That was a thing she'd heard about before. She hadn't gotten her powers until after college so even if the computers then couldn't hold a candle to the computers of today, she knew enough about writing term papers and Word. "Read it through to update the dates and the seasons and the rest is all the same, really. Just. Proof read. Please. I don't want to sound like this was a surprise to us." Damn. HR had really dropped the ball on this one.

The chaos that was today was going to result in some kind of investigation. Her secretarial staff had contained most of it by ordering a light lunch of lame sandwiches and shuffling the intern B-listers around as needed. She should probably buy them lunch. And really, more interns weren't a problem. It was cheap labor. Sure, there was an initial drop in productivity, but if the departments used their interns right, it actually brought in better results, an influx of new ideas, and new thinking.

Yeah. She could spin this mishap to the board of directors. Easy.

"Here, Ms. Faust." The mousy secretary that always wore brown had a stack of hand outs all ready to go and her personal assistant wasn't too far from finishing up that speech. All before lunch, too.

Dinner for the secretaries, maybe, instead of lunch. They would all still be here sorting paperwork...

Dressed in a jewel-toned red despite severing most of her Order connections, Lori went to work indoctrinating the new kids.

"Welcome to Faust Pharmaceuticals!" A brief introduction of herself and the company marketing mumbo-jumbo that she'd memorized segued nicely into today's spin, "You might not have been expecting to hear from us, but with so many bright minds applying how could we possibly say no? We're still working the kinks out of our new Fall Intern program, but I know there's some mutual learning to be had here. Congratulations on your internships!"

After that it was as simple as regurgitating the dossier from the spring intern selection. Letting the kids munch for a while and then the department heads would come and escort... shit. Lori bothered the front desk staff while the interns were eating. The upstairs secretarial staff could round up those department heads in no time, right?

Bam. Crisis averted.

Hopefully tomorrow wouldn't be so hectic.

boolean stupidEMPLadyStillInCity = true;
int relativeHecticLevel = 1;

while (stupidEMPLadyStillInCity) {
   relativeHecticLevel *= 1000;
};

System.out.println("please go live in a hobo box and it is okay if you die there");

Today was not as hectic as yesterday. Today was worse. A thousand times worse.

Panu was making a very ugly pot. As his teacher commented to one of her part time aids when they were alone in the kiln room, "It's like he's never done art before, ever."

In Faust Pharmaceuticals, IT had created fifteen new accounts for fifteen new interns. The only part of Faust in his direct range was HR and HR was stupid and not useful, so it was hard to get into the good parts of the company system directly. But it was not so hard to skim the surface with a monitoring program for new key strokes on all machines, and query the results.

Like most offices, the login name for computers was first initial + last name. The default password was a unintelligible string as pretty as his pottery. To a normal person, this was maybe a hard password to remember and to use. Panu did not know. As fifteen interns spread across the company logged into their computers for the first time, first initial + last name, it was very easy to find their passwords too. This was the second thing they typed (though he did have to look through the results a little more, because some of them had to enter their password two or three times before they typed it right, and a few figured out how to set their password to things that were easier for them to remember.)

"At least he's having fun," the aid whispered back to his art teacher.

Once he had the passwords, it was easy to use HR's computers when they were away. They were stressing an eco-friendly work environment and turning off their monitors while they were at meetings and lunch, so they did not even see him working. When they wiggled their mice he logged off again, it was easy.

Fifteen interns across the company, with access to shared drives in as many departments. Not all of them had the right passwords or permissions, but these were easier to get now that he had an in. It was all very boring to skim through, but a lot of it sounded very important, like things adults cared about.

Like Cure Trials Variation B6875 Observation and Reaction Log, and Staff Directory.

When the research department found the last three months of its compiled data missing, they spent most of the morning trying to find it again. Men and women in white coats ran surreptitiously from lab to lab, whispering grim tidings to co-workers. Finally, the department head steeled herself, and picked up her phone to call Ms. Faust.

It was reassuring to them all, somehow, when the Staff Directory was also missing. No less than five scientists went to IT in person, and began making it clear that it was IT and not their department which was to blame for these losses.

It had been only two days since the last complete system back up, so IT was not too concerned (though the researchers were less pleased by this news, two days was two days). The system was restored.

By the time the researchers had marched back to their own department, the data was gone again.

"That is legitimately the ugliest pot I've ever seen. A blind kid could do better."

"Aww, but look at the smile on his face. Don't you wish you could still get that happy about the little things?"

At 3:56, the heads of research and IT flipped a coin together. Research lost, and had to knock on Lori Faust's door and explain the situation. It seemed there was some kind of worm in the system, eating data whenever it was restored. It had a particular appetite for the mutant cure research trials.

Panu made sure to back up the data to his own servers. He would give it to Mr. Jaager tonight, as a present. Maybe he would give the man his pot, too, after he glazed it tomorrow. It was the first he had made where all of the sides had stayed mostly straight, and he was very proud of it.

There was a mole in her company.

Lori sat in her office with steepled fingers as the head of the Research department told her a tale about some kind of data-eating computer virus thing. Sparks flickered to life and fell away from the exposed skin of her body like castoffs from a sparkler. As her irritation grew, so did the frequency of sparkling.

The timing was too perfect. New interns? And on their first official day, now FP had a problem with their data? This mole wasn't too bright. (S)he could have lain in wait and done worse damage.

Unless the mole wasn't a mole. What if one of their interns had been approached by a competitor?

Jager ... no, Jaager? Whatever. That stupid foreign guy had moved into "human trials" again lately. Mutant trials, really. At Faust Pharmaceuticals marketing mandated it be referred to as "personal trials." Whatever. Her money was on him since the data kept targeting their own cure trial data.

She'd thought he'd been further along than FP. Why would he need to sabotage what they had? Unless...

Pharmaceutical companies did not long stand on their own. They liked to team up and buy each other out. Heck, she'd folded a few smaller research startups into her own company before they had the chance to get big enough to compete.

Against conglomerates like JW, though? Taking over even so large a company as Faust Pharmaceuticals was probably small potatoes.

This could be the beginning of a hostile takeover.

The department head in front of Lori shifted uncomfortably in the silence while the CEO chewed over this new information. Lori looked increasingly irritated, the longer the Researcher waited.

Finally, the blonde had come to a decision. Lori's eyes snapped to the head of the research department.

"Get me the head of IT. I need you to send an intra-office memo. Get together with my secretary and get me a draft before the end of today. I need everyone to a) be on the look out for signs that their interns are behaving in a suspicious manner and b) ask their interns if they were approached before they came to us. Don't mention the data issues. Just get a feeling if they have any competitor connections, JW or otherwise. Actually-" Lori laid her hands against her desk and took a moment to think.

Was she prepared to give all this up? She could. The cure could be JW's problem.

Roger and Rupert both came to mind. Her father. Herself. Her sparking settled down to only the occasional dropping fly of light.

No.

Lori stood.

"Actually, I'm going to IT. Draft the memo. I'll pull the trigger later, when I get back."

She ushered a surprised Research department head out to the secretarial desk outside.

"I'm going down to IT, you might want to call ahead."

---

Some hours later, they had a solid plan. IT had off-site backups of their data. It was two days old, but that was better than loosing everything. She threatened to visit more often to check up on the backup process, but the IT department assured her it would become a daily task.

For now, IT would keep trying to save and reload data. The Research department would print paper copies of data (or in all likely-hood, it would be transcribed by interns) and the paper datasets would be filed for reference and later digitization.

IT would also be on the lookout for suspicious behavior linked to the intern accounts. An unusual number of logins. Logins from the wrong place or wrong time.

Security would be on high alert: 100% mandatory ID processing with extra eyes on the cameras.

It was the best they could do for now.

The printer thing, though... that was just baffling. After they couldn't get the damn things to stop spewing paper, IT had manually disconnected them from the server.

"Please go live in a hobo box and it is okay if you die there." Lori read the words and tried to find meaning there beyond childish provocation. It wasn't even addressed at anyone in particular. Was her company being targeted because some moron in marketing had been targeted? Now that would be irritating.

Panu did not read memos. He did not care about reading emails at all. There were many sent every day, and they were not very interesting.

When he wanted an email to say something interesting, he could write it himself.

Panu spent Wednesday morning putting more and more layers of glaze on his pot. He did not dip it in the bucket like the other children did, because the teachers saw him trying to dip for a third time and made him stop. They gave him a paintbrush and very small cups of glaze, instead. He traced happy lines and dots and splatter patterns until lunch. (His teachers were starting to think the boy was not just shy, but that something-was-wrong-with-him. You did not argue with such children. You just gave them thimble sized paint cups, and let them be happy.)

Panu had finally settled down to try properly tunneling into the Faust system. Not the whole system--they had many servers. He only wanted the one that the accounting department used. It was annoying to trace. IT had disconnected many things to try and stop the "data worm" from spreading, so there were fewer paths he could take. Finally he got very annoyed and raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom. He was a very good child (even if maybe he was simple), so they let him go alone. The bathrooms were only just down the hallway.

Panu walked past the boys' room, and took the stairs up a level, and walked past the weight room and the overlook into the pool and to the far wall of the building, the one that they shared with Faust. Now he could access most of the building directly, and did not have to bother with slow logins. He found a computer in the accounting department and happily copied the most recent files. Then he went back to his class.

He kept painting his pot, trying to do a swan but maybe he should have done that first because now it just looked like there were many many colors in one area. Oh well.

He also went on Reddit. This was one of his favorite sites since coming to America. Three days ago he had put up this:

Post title: if you were an unhappy accountant and wanted to ruin your company's financial records, how would you do it? (serious)

Description: so that it seems smart and is hard to figure out what you did.

Now there were many replies. He did not know which ones were good, but some of them sounded good, and that was the important thing. Panu opened up his copies of their most recent budgets, and began to do all the things.

In about two hours he raised his hand and really really had to go to the bathroom again. He went upstairs, and found accounting again. Two computers, it did not matter who as long as they were accountants. He had already written the emails. He only needed to copy-paste-send them back and forth from the right accounts. He did not even care that the two people were still at their computers, it was funny to think of them watching. He was very very quick, less than a minute. The slowest part was waiting for one message to be received by the next computer before he could reply again. One of them was smart and unplugged their computer but by then he was done enough to hit forward from the other computer.

This message was sent to Wolf News and several other media outlets:

Do not contact us, we wish to be anonymous. We just thought someone should know. There is something very wrong at Faust Pharmaceuticals.

Attached was a conversation between two junior accountants who were worriedly discussing errors they had found in certain documents that seemed now to be fixed on the server, though they did not know who had fixed them. They worried that Faust was involved in unscrupulous activities and hiding it, or maybe going bankrupt and hiding that, after all everyone in the company knew the cure trials were going terribly and Lori Faust was a bad CEO who was leading them to ruin by pouring all their money down a hole for her pet project. Both accountants agreed it would be better if she fired herself. Panu had changed the times of the emails so that they were several days apart, not several seconds.

The attached documents, the "originals," showed double counted revenue, mysterious accounts with thousands in their budgets that disappeared from one report to the next, and many other things. Panu did not know if any of them made sense, but he was told that American media did not like to read everything before they reported on a story, so that was probably okay.

Just because he could, he also messed with the traffic lights from streets leading in and out of Faust. Street lights were very simple, but had many hard-wired safety measures. This made it hard to reprogram them entirely, but very easy to set them all to blinking red.

He did this just as the work day ended. New York drivers completed the traffic jam without any further help from the eight-year-old. He hoped this would be blamed on Lori. After all, the emails said, everyone knew the CEO broke electric things when she got upset.

Chocolate. It wasn't a cure-all, but it helped remind Lori to speak sweetly over the phone as she parroted her answers to yet another Wolf News inquiry.

For once, the truth was more than sufficient. They were under a malicious cyber attack. She didn't have to hint at who might be behind it since they all had similar lines of questions to her own suspicions. She couldn't say who it was until they had a third-party, unbiased firm finish their investigation. This was a precarious time to use a heavy hand so she had to trust that those inquiring minds would hit the trail running. She would also have to trust that the firm that they'd hired was better than whoever was doing all this.

By the end of the conversation they were exchanging buzzwords and key phrases like underdog, fear of hostile take over, and American-made, built from the ground up company.

Which was true. She'd taken over the project and built it from the ground up after the haywire fight when she'd inadvertently torn the old one down.

That was a time when the Order had been weak and she'd used them to get things for herself. Like Faust Pharmaceuticals. It had taken her some time to reconstruct the how's and why's of her time with the Order. Mutant superiority was a laughable idea. Especially when there were such things as Adapteds.

Which... was an interesting idea, now that she'd had it.

Lori sent the next call to voicemail and went to visit the suite she'd stashed at the top of this building. She had a computer and a printer there. Definitely worth seeing how many "go die in a fire" pages she'd had printed.

---

A man, frail-looking with a darting and suspicious set of blue eyes, accompanied a most pleased Lori down to the IT department. He was twitchy, easily frightened, and refused to speak except in the smallest of whispers.

Lori stayed with him and when IT confirmed her suspicions, she wheeled him back to the elevators with a reward of fruit snacks.

They were under a cyber attack that was being executed by a mutant.

It was a good thing that Lori had more than a few on speed dial for when she really needed a good shower. Soon they had one stationed near the local server bank. In a few hours, they'd have one at their remote server as well.

That was all well and good for defense. Now, it was time to plan some kind of counter-initiative.

Panu had gone to Finland.

He did not remember much of the trip. This meant that he had put the files somewhere else, somewhere outside of his own head where he couldn't just think Finland and have a tide of images and sound come rushing back. He had left himself a text file note. Probably it said where the memories were, and why he had hidden them. Panu did not want to read it.

They had blown up a police station and torn up part of the city and something had been done about the police who had caught him and his parents who missed him. He did not want to know what. They had been successful, and on the plane ride back, he had carefully gathered the memories and filtered them and locked them away.

This told Panu that he already knew as much as he wanted to know about what had happened there.

Probably the Faust woman thought her stupid Adapted--

(cross reference detected: Adapted. Download memory file 2015092902114598? Y / N)

(N)

--Stupid stupid Adapted had protected her, and that is why her company had been free of attacks in the past week. If she thought that, it was only because she was stupid. He was back now, and it was time to finish what he had started.

Jaager was mad at him, and he did not remember what he had done. (download memory file--? N) Angry maybe wasn't even the word. Jaager was ignoring him. Not using him. Not asking him to do anything. Treating him like a good for nothing child.

The eight year old shoved his hands in his hoodie pocket, and stared up at Faust Pharmaceuticals from across the busy New York street.

He would do the best corporate take down ever. Then Jaager would see that he was useful again. There was no time to waste. With days gone by and no attack launched, their guard was as lowered as it was going to get.

Panu walked to the street's end, and changed the lights so he could cross without even stopping. Also without hearing those stupid Wait Wait Wait voices that they had put in for blind people. He wondered if other blind people found them just as annoying as he did.

As soon as he walked in range, he set to work. He needed to do something big, something amazing, something the media could not ignore. Something Jaager could not ignore.

Inside the building, fire alarms tripped and wailed into life. A moment later, the sprinkler system followed. They had a new system like Jaager Worldwide: the kind with electronic heat sensors, the kind that was wired to work together. If the building had not been state-of-the-art, he could not have done this: older buildings had sprinklers that broke under physical heat. Simple, stupid machines that he could not touch.

But Lori's building was very new, and very updated.

And very wet.

As the employees evacuated, he showed himself in through a little side door off an alley. It smelled like smoke, and there was a place to throw away cigarette butts next to the door. Electronic keycards were beautiful inventions, and their readers like him very much. He asked nicely, and it let him.

He asked her cameras to ignore him, and they did. Little blips of replayed footage followed him down the hallways. He could see which were empty, and he took them. He knew the path.

He was going to the basement. The place where she had no cameras at all. Probably down there were things that would make Jaager like him again.

The basement was her refuge. Here was where Lori got her real work done. Her best work. Leaps and bounds were made here. Illegal leaps and bounds, but illegal progress was better than no progress. She needed this.

Besides. Down here. Waaaay down under Faust Pharmaceuticals away from prying eyes, worries about legality, media, and other bulls**t... Lori could crank the music.

Father did you miss me?
Don't ask me where I've been.

"I can't even think!" The scientist Lori was assisting complained, barely audible over the speakers. It made her smile under her mask and goggles. They were collecting samples today. She'd paid an arm and a leg and half her ass over again to keep this scientist on the payroll. He was the one with all her secrets. He should know by now that he only had two retirement options: retire in style or retire into the ground.

You know I know,
Yes, I've been told I redefine a sin.

"Good thing you don't have to think to run a centrifuge." Lori ran her hand lovingly over the huddled body in the glass cage. He'd volunteered for this initially, but sometimes it was hard for Lori to let go of her toys.

I don't know what's driving me to put this in my head.
Maybe I wish I could die, maybe I am dead!

She was careful with the administration of the IV. They'd taken a lot of blood today and she didn't want to damage her toy. This one had a little something special going on: another degenerative x-gene. The blonde smoothed her hand across the body's hair and it sighed. Every single mutant was a unique little snowflake. How was she supposed to solve every single rubix cube all at once while her castle kept crumbling all around her?

And he said
For the lives that I fake, I'm going to hell!
For the vows that I break, I'm going to hell!

There was no way that they could hear any fire alarms with all that racket. No way that they could see a little boy approaching the camera dead-zone when he made all the CCTVs turn a blind eye to his path. No way that the little Fin would know that he was walking down into a basement with only one exit and a heavy seal door that would soon shut in order to keep the sprinkler runoff from following him down.

Lori straightened her coat and re-locked the door after her exit. No sprinkler system down here. (They'd seen the folly in that when they triggered the mutation of an honest-to-X lavamancer.) In fact, there wasn't much of any technology that wasn't portable— dragged in for temporary use and then lugged back out again. Even the songs Lori blasted today were played from a record. Much safer than CD player or, worse, magnetic strip cassette tape.

Rupert had opinions about this album.

Mr. Scienceman pursed his lips as Lori passed over the vials. "Okay, okay. You win." She made her way to turn down the volume.

The door was not opening. Okay. That was okay. He would just--

tug yank jerk stupid door move

--just determine that the skidding point of his sneakers was much lower than the opening strength needed for this door. Okay. That was okay. It was stupid door with stupid fail safe switch that would shut off on its own when water stopped puddling outside. He just needed to wait until then, or find another door. Down here all was stupid and cameraless, but upstairs were many cameras, and their Adapted must have evacuated with the rest of their staff. The Fin just needed to look for another stairway that led down, and then he could figure out which direction to explore. He would just--

connection error no networks in range

retry retry retry retryretryretryretry

no. networks. in. range.

--he would just use archive footage in his own head to look for doors. It was less efficient because before he had not been looking for a door, so there were no good tags on the files, but he had looked through each of the eyes in Faust's interior at some time or another. Only stupid children let their hearts thumb against the inside of their ribs over stupid little things like this. He would just look through the footage and take deep breaths--

--and find nothing. No other doors. None.

This was stupid reason to feel scared, stupid reason to start breathing fast. It was the basement of a major corporation, and he'd been sealed in by a dumb mechanical fail safe, not a real person. It was not like he had stepped in train boxcar and heard door dragged closed on rusty track behind him and now he was locked in with murder hobo. He was alone here, everyone was outside. He should just explore and take footage and then when water stopped the door would open and he would sneak out again. Even if he was caught, he could say he had gone down one flight of stairs too many, that he was looking for the exit when the door sealed. Everything was fine. The alarms had even turned off, so soon probably the water would too. He had muted the volume on his organic ears so he did not need to hear the beep beep beep screaming into his head. But he did not hear it at all now, so it was safe to turn back up. He did.

Very very faintly, through the locked door, he could still hear the fire alarm.

Very very not faintly, from down in the murder hobo train car basement, he could hear rock music.

Probably someone had just left on their... not their iPod or their phone or their CD player or their computer. Their ghost music? What even played music that was not an iPod-phone-computer? He would google this but

no networks in range

His signal had disappeared as soon as the door had shut. This happened in subways too, this was just how New York worked. It was not dangerous at all, just like music left to play with no one around was annoying and way too loud but not dangerous--

The volume decreased, suddenly and sharply. In the silence Panu heard murder hobos scrapping rusty doors shut.

(Not really.)

(Probably.)

(Maybe.)

The door behind him was very locked still, and the hallway ahead was empty and long and he did not want to be in it if someone stepped outside. Panu hurried to the first unlocked door he found, and opened it. It was okay. It was fine. He just needed to find somewhere to hide and not be murdered.